Coexistence without domination

I25

To me winning would be being able to live life without feeling like I owe something….I think it really depends on the situation. I think it's safe to say that if there were no need for prisons, no need for borders, or money, all of these sort of institutionalized methods of control, I think if you got rid of all those and just had the co-existence of people working, living together and not depleting and stripping the ecosystem in which they're placed, to me I guess that would be [winning].

A world without rape culture

I11

I try and imagine a world without rape culture sometimes and it's pretty exciting.

In between winning and losing

I15

I can't conceptualize political movements as win-lose. Maybe I could conceptualize them as winning and losing in that it's a constant process. I don't think there is anything to win. Not only is it a myth but also it’s dejecting. If I try and think about what it would mean to win, I just can't, it's not possible for my brain to think about that and so anything that comes short of having won is then a failure. Even if I were to try and conceptualize winning and losing, obviously, I think right now we're losing but I do feel like I make gains when I have a conversation with my sister and...at the end of the conversation [she] commits to changing her behaviour in some way that I find impedes her ability to have meaningful social relations with other people, especially other women.

Being a radical

I18

When I say that I'm a radical it means that I'm an extreme leftist, it means that I'm ideological, it means that I have an ideology of what I consider to be the way the world works, how it works for the worst and how it could work for the better and I have principles...that are rooted in me….I am a radical in that I would prefer there to be a destruction of capitalism....I don't...see reform as being an option….I really mean the destruction of current systems [to be replaced with] better systems...

Other worlds are possible

I5

The Zapatistas offered a vision that other worlds were still possible. That a radical struggle against global capitalism could be engaged in that people could come together in a spirit of affinity and solidarity and actually not try and just dominate and control each other with a singular blueprint of the world or what the world could be. And I found that all very inspiring. And the fact that it was communicated through parables, through myth, through allegory, through poetry, through symbolic demonstration as much as through an armed uprising I found really powerful.

Turning the tide

I20

I guess what I keep hoping is that the people who are using the skills of working together, of growing food, making things, of connecting with people despite barriers and differences, that when there is an inevitable big shift in this particularly unsustainable political and economical world we live in...there will be enough of these to...turn the tide.

A liberated society

I12

I guess an anarchist society would be a society with the ability to choose your own options, and your own freedoms, and your own lifestyle without having to basically grow up with a set of options that are provided for you...by society. You have very few avenues to go [down] right now. You can either go to school, you can go to trades, you can be homeless, there are very rigid options that we're provided [with] and if you don't conform...it's a struggle.

Imperfect victories

I19

I was recently watching a video of people trying to block a deportation at an airport and I think that's a win…..We’re actually physically going to try and block you from deporting this person so that you actually cannot. I think that's a win and more of a win than a policy concession....The problem is that those kinds of wins are always so finite in time and they're not perfect, right? They're by no means perfect in that maybe not every form of domination is rejected in that moment but some form of it is and I think that's fairly rare.

Winning right now

I14

So, short term what would winning mean to me? I would like to see the Canada health act pass into legislation right now. I'd like to see [the former] NDP government pushed on a variety of different fronts from below to keep it to the minimum promises it made and I'd like to see the beginnings of building some kind of mass progressive movement here in Nova Scotia. That to me would be the short term win.

Outrage, movements, and institutionalization

I17

Protests, they get a lot of attention, but unless you have millions of people it's not going to amount to anything and one of the things governments have learned is that volunteers wear out eventually. You can't sustain a white-hot movement indefinitely without becoming an institution. So as soon as that happens you've lost the white-hot outrage that got you started….In order to have the kind of impact [you] want, [you] have to become something different then [you]...started out to be.